NEWSLETTER | PODCAST | NEW MEDIA
Hey readers,
Welcome back to your weekly tech digest, a quick look at the biggest stories shaping the tech world this week.
This past week: the AI funding race showed no signs of slowing. Poolside raised $6B led by Nvidia, Mistral closed a $3.5B round at a $24.4B valuation, and Cognition raised $2B at a $48B valuation. Harvey meanwhile, hit a $15.5B valuation just months after its last raise. On the consolidation side, Bending Spoons acquired Miro for $1.3B, a fraction of its 2022 $17.5B valuation, another sign that even well-funded SaaS companies are getting bought for a few multiples of revenue rather than the premiums they once commanded a few years ago.
Y Combinator also held its Summer 2026 Demo Day earlier this week, with a couple of stats worth noting: 52% of startups are B2B, with founders increasingly building the infrastructure behind AI agents rather than the agents themselves, from routing and context management to evaluation and automation. See the full batch breakdown below.
This edition covers:
👀 The latest AI news
🗝️ Inside the YC Summer 2026 batch
💰 Top startup news & funding rounds (sourced using Harmonic)
🤝 Acquisitions including a look at the Bending Spoons portfolio
🎤 Must-watch interviews from our podcast show
and much more.
Inside the current state of AI
Harvey hits $15.5B valuation, months after reaching $11B having just raised another $550M!
Instacart launched an AI grocery shopping assistant called Clementine.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for AI labs to slow the pace of frontier-model development, proposing independent evaluators, coordination between labs, and international cooperation.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also said he doesn’t expect OpenAI to IPO in 2026 and described even a 10% risk of AI-driven human extinction as unacceptable.
Top startup news & funding rounds
We take a closer look at some of the hottest startup rounds of the week:
Poolside, the AI coding agent suite for development environments, raised $6B led by NVIDIA.
Mistral, the enterprise and government-focused frontier AI model developer, raised $3.5B Series D at a $24.4B valuation co-led by Samsung Electronics, EQT Group, European Innovation Council, and PSG.
Cognition, the autonomous software engineer behind Devin, raised $2B Series E at a $48B valuation co-led by Avenir, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Accel.
Motive, the AI-powered fleet management and driver safety platform, raised $1.3B led by General Catalyst.
Stoke Space, the fully reusable rocket system developer, raised $1B Series E at a $10B valuation co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, with Y Combinator, Glade Brook Capital, and Woven Capital.
Positron AI, the specialized AI inference hardware maker, raised $875M Series C at a $5B valuation co-led by Atreides Management, SemiAnalysis, NEA, Andra, and Valor Equity Partners, with Qatar Investment Authority, Cisco Investments, and Hudson River Trading.
Mach Industries, the ML-driven defense manufacturing company, raised $600M Series C extension at a $3.7B valuation, with Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Bedrock Capital, and Infinite Capital.
The Exploration Company, the European reusable space capsule and rocket engine developer, raised $450M Series C co-led by EQT Group, Bessemer Venture Partners, European Innovation Council, and Atomico, with Balderton and Plural participating.
Tripo AI, the AI platform that generates 3D models from text, images, or sketches, raised $447M Series B extension, with DreamWorks Animation, ThunderSoft, CMC Capital Partners, and BlueFocus.
Celero Communications, the coherent optical DSP chipmaker for AI data center interconnects, raised $275M Series C at a $3B valuation co-led by CapitalG, Valor Equity Partners, and Atreides Management, with Sutter Hill Ventures.
Encoded Therapeutics, the gene therapy developer targeting neurological disorders, raised $275M Series F led by GV, with ARCH Venture Partners, SoftBank, Venrock, RTW Investments, and Illumina Ventures.
Covenant, the long-range precision strike weapons system developer, raised $250M at a $1B valuation, with Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Lightspeed, 8VC, Altimeter, and Aleph.
Cylake, the AI-native on-prem cybersecurity platform, raised $245M convertible note co-led by Redpoint, Lightspeed, and Picture Capital.
Solstice Oncology, the clinical-stage immuno-oncology company focused on neoadjuvant treatment, raised $225M Series A led by RA Capital Management, with Canaan and Forbion.
Forus, the AI-powered medication access and prior authorization network, raised $150M Series C at a $3B valuation led by Bain Capital Ventures, with Thrive Capital, Accel, General Catalyst, Redpoint, and BoxGroup.
Ayar Labs, the co-packaged optics chipmaker connecting GPUs across racks, raised $150M with NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, MediaTek, and Wiwynn.
Beep, the autonomous shuttle and driverless mobility network, raised $130M Series B led by Mobileye.
Kapital, the Mexican financial platform for business payments, credit, and international transfers, raised $125M Series C extension co-led by Tru Arrow Partners and Fasanara Capital, with Cervin Ventures and Niya Partners.
TAR, the American energy infrastructure builder, raised $120M Series A at a $1B valuation led by Spark Capital, with Buckley Ventures and Align.
Carrum, the Indian fleet operator received a $10M investment from Uber at a $168M valuation
(sourced using Harmonic)
Acquisitions
Meta acquired Swedish artificial intelligence startup Stilla AI.
Bending Spoons acquired collaboration tool Miro for $1.3B, 90% below its $17.5B 2022 valuation, despite Miro having raised a $400M Series C. It's another case study in the current state of SaaS: companies with hundreds of millions in revenue and cash-rich balance sheets are still only fetching 2-3x revenue on exit. Who's next on Bending Spoons' list?
Here’s their acquisitions to date 👇
2018: Splice (Price N/A)
2021: Remini (Price N/A)
2022: Filmic (N/A), Evernote ($200M)
2024: Mosaic Group ($100M), Meetup (N/A), Issuu ($100M), WeTransfer ($500M), StreamYard + Vimeo ($1.38B)
2025: Brightcove ($233M), Komoot ($350M), Harvest (N/A), AOL (N/A)
2026: Tractive ($781M), Eventbrite ($500M), Airtable ($1.3B), Miro ($1.3B).
Inside the YC Summer 2026 batch from this week’s demo day
Y Combinator’s Summer ‘26 Demo Day took place on Thursday so we’re back with a full overview of the latest startups in the batch, what they’re building, the categories they’re focused on and the trends behind them, as well as the partners who coached them.
So what have we learned about this batch so far?
52% of the batch are B2B startups, with founders building across productivity, the agent supply chain, and infrastructure tools for other companies rather than end users.
Consumer stays a minority category at around 5% of the batch, consistent with the last several cohorts.
The agent story is maturing: YC’s previous batch was defined by agent applications, while this batch of companies are building the infrastructure underneath them, routing, context management, evaluation, and automation tooling that makes an agent usable in production.
Batch size: 235 companies are in this cohort, a 20% increase from the previous batch.
Let’s explore the latest trends shaping this batch in full.
Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos is back in the news: A24 has revealed, You Can See Everything, a documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim covering the 34 days before she reported to prison in 2023. It premiered as a secret screening at Telluride and hits theaters October 16.
So, if she made a comeback, what would it look like?
Episode 3 of Billion Dollar Tea, our AI microdrama on fiction and non-fiction stories tells one possible comeback scenario!
Must-watch interviews from our podcast show
One of our latest podcast guests is one incredible founder: Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo, who shares how he started and scaled the social network into one of the most popular sites of its time before selling it to AOL for $850 million in 2008, how he reinvented himself after Bebo, and what he’s building now that Bebo is closed for good after 21 years.
Previous episodes include
Superhuman CEO: The Strategy to Turn Standalone Apps Into a $13 Billion Suite | Shishir Mehrotra.
Europe Is Quietly Building the New Silicon Valley | Saul Klein.
$2 Billion Founder: The Secret to Building a High-Growth Startup in 24 Months | Tanay Kothari.
Canva Co-Founder: AI Is Useless Without This 1 Skill | Cam Adams.
Why most people are underusing AI and why the winners won’t just be OpenAI and Anthropic | Reid Hoffman.
Base44 Founder: The Strategy Behind Building a Million Dollar Company Solo | Maor Shlomo (Base44) & Mark Tluszcz (Wix).
Watch and subscribe now!
See all previous episodes here 👉
If you enjoyed this edition, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.